Questionable content, possibly linked

Tag: internet

China’s 50 Cent Party (named from the 0.5 yuan payment per posting) trains and employs tens of thousands of online commentators to promote the PRC party line and control public opinion on microblogs, bulletin board systems, and chatrooms.

From Russia☭ With Love 💔

If you’ve participated at all in comments online over the past year, the certainty is near 100% that you’ve seen other people or have been called yourself, a “troll,” “shill,” or maybe even a <gasp> “Russian.”

Accusations like these are rampant online, as is the paranoia which fosters them, thanks in no small part to a cloud of sensationalist media coverage and our seemingly intrinsic need to find bad guys lurking around every corner…

Disrupting democracy

Showtime’s most recent season of Homeland — season 6, episode 9 (2017) — portrays a shadowy quasi-governmental, private tech startup called the Office of Policy Coordination. Located six floors underground in a nondescript office building outside Washington, DC, the company is found to be responsible for secretly running a massive army of phony sock-puppet accounts across social media, posing as ordinary people in order to advance a nefarious political agenda.

Airing originally in March of this year, the subplot is obviously inspired by events which transpired in cyberspace around the 2016 U.S. presidential election (along with Brexit, and possibly others), where malicious state-sponsored actors allegedly attempted to disrupt the democratic process.

We know the real world analogue of Homeland’s fictional Office of Policy Coordination to be the now infamous Internet Research Agency, or as they’re sometimes called in the media, the ‘Trolls from Olgino.’

Given the confusing, conflicting, and convoluted information out there about this alleged Russian interference, I took it upon myself to do the only logical thing any normal person would do: make a Carrie Mathison-style “crazy wall” inside my shed next to my chicken coop to try and sort it all out.

Okay, sure, it’s not quite as crazy as Carrie’s bipolar-driven Abu Nazir wall, but it’s my first time exteriorizing my own inner crazy wall. So cut me some slack. I had to start somewhere. And I can definitely say: the process was not only extremely useful in developing my understanding, but also oddly very therapeutic.

Persona Management Software Systems

In the subsequent Homeland episode (s06e10), Carrie’s friend and accomplice Max (Maury Sterling) states: “I’ve heard rumors of social media boiler rooms like this in Russia and in China, but not here. And definitely not on this scale.”

I don’t want to tv-splain too much because I know this is just drama, but based on my research into the subject — using all open source, publicly available information, which I’ve documented with a near religious zeal over the past three weeks — Max’s statement overlooks some important facts which are likely to be known by those working IRL in the security and intelligence fields.

Namely, that in 2010, the U.S. Air Force posted a solicitation to build what amounts to exactly the type of sock-puppet app portrayed in Homeland. Or as they called it on the Federal Business Opportunities website, Persona Management Software (fbo.gov, reproduced on Archive.org, June 2010).

It is, essentially, a social media and propaganda battle-station. From the solicitation:

“Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user’s situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.”

Through a combination of VPNs, untraceable IPs, and traffic routed through regional proxies, such a service would enable mass identity-spoofing, using persistent personas, each of which has a detailed personal and social media character history for complete verisimilitude.

Though another company was ultimately awarded the contract (Ntrepid), there was a very relevant document leak by Anonymous from a security contractor called HB Gary Federal in 2011, in which that company’s own vision for such a persona management system was fleshed out in detail.

“For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.” …

“These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds, retweets, and linking together social media commenting between platforms. With a pool of these accounts to choose from, once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name, lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected # of previously created social media accounts, automatically pre-aging the real accounts.”

Character levels

The proposal goes on to describe various “character levels” within their system, based on utility and level of content development:

Level 0: Quick use, no background persona required.

Level 1: Slightly more fleshed out, with multiple accounts across different services correlated to one another, with privacy set to high on accounts so as not to disclose too much information publicly.

Level 2: More detailed persistent persona with background; fleshed out with blend of automated and human-generated content history.

Level 3: Most detailed, developed and realistic; capable of having human-to-human (online) interactions, with multiple correlated social accounts and a realistic personal, and professional background if needed.

We can assume with a high degree of certainty, that if such advanced persona management software systems have been under development since at least 2010, that they have very probably advanced somewhat in the seven years which have passed since. To say the least…

Are they at the level of what’s depicted in Homeland’s “Sock Puppets” episode?

Hard to say —without penetrating the secret offices alleged to be using them!

Government manipulation of social media

Whether or not our television fantasies here hew close to actual reality — and Americans have been or are currently intentionally manipulated by secret factions in the United States (e.g., the “Deep State”) — a recent report by Freedom House, a US government-sponsored NGO, announced evidence that governments of some 30 countries currently use astro-turfing techniques to manipulate opinion on social media.

For the most part, the operations of these covert cyber troops are said to have a domestic-focus, with the notable exceptions of Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election, Brexit, also likely the French and German presidential campaigns, and more recently around the Spanish independence push in Catalonia.

But the story with regards to Russia goes deeper than that…

Much, much deeper.

Reports from inside the troll farm

Over the past several years, operational details from inside the Internet Research Agency have been provided by a series of leaks from former employees, infiltrations by journalists, and break-ins by hacktivists.

Most recently:

Ex-IRA employee Alan Baskaev described to The Daily Beast in October 2017, an outrageous work environment, in which (among other things) the organization allegedly produced a fake Hillary Clinton sex tape intended to go viral.

Russian media site RBC.ru published in October 2017 a Russian-language expose of the IRA, which has become something of a canonical source in online discussions of the topic (I used Google Chrome auto-translate extension to read it). Some useful context on RBC: their offices were raided by the Russian government in 2016 after publishing documents from the Panama Papers, connecting Putin’s son-in-law to offshore assets, and ending in the sacking of their then editor-in-chief, and mass resignation of significant portion of their journalistic staff. RBC was owned until June 2017 by billionaire Mikhail Prokhorav — owner of the Brooklyn Nets basketball team, and failed 2012 presidential election opponent to Putin.

Collaborating with Adrian Chen of the NY Times in his seminal June 2015 article, “The Agency,” environmental activist Lyudmila Savchuk took a job with the IRA, documented and leaked information to the public describing the organization’s internal structure and techniques. As in the USAF and HB Gary documents, we learn that agency employees used VPNs to mask their location while propagating through phony social media accounts propaganda talking points, keywords and targets provided by daily technical task sheets.

“…thousands of young men and women are learning how to be supporters of the ruling United Russia party, future politicians and senior government officials. […]

These young people are taught to open up accounts in all social networks, make as many friends as possible and thus spread information with maximum efficiency,” explained Vasily Yakemenko, founder of the Nashi youth group and head of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs that runs the camp.”

Also from the 2013 Novaya Gazeta reporting, we learn that Soskovets’ own North-Western Service Agency was seeking employees to open up offices similar to the Internet Research Agency in Moscow and other cities. It is unknown how many other organizations like the IRA are in operation. Soskovets in that article discusses humans being used in place of bots, because they are much more difficult to detect than bots, which platforms are able to find and suspend easily.

Nashi leaks of 2012

Though not specifically linked to the IRA, the Nashi youth movement leaks of 2012 (which appeared just before Putin’s challenging but successful 2012 re-election for a controversial third term) provide supplemental evidence of quasi-governmental youth organizations orchestrating prototypical astro-turfing and media manipulation campaigns, as well as pro-government counter-protests. Exactly like the techniques which have been documented above by the IRA, both on and offline, but engaged at the time in embryonic form against Russian mass anti-election fraud protests of 2011–2013 and events in the Ukraine.

We see echoes in BBC reporting from March 2012 of the types of attacks which came to be common place years later during the U.S. presidential election:

“These bots succeeded in blocking the actual message feed with that hashtag,” he wrote.

The rate at which pro-government messages were posted, about 10 per second, suggests they were being done automatically rather than by individuals…”

The facts about the Internet Research Agency

Via the above sources, we can determine a few key facts which can be used to track and organize our data.

It has held at least two different addresses, both in St. Petersburg: starting sometime in 2013, at 131 Lakhtinsky Prospekt (Olgino district), and moving probably in 2014 to a larger office with more staff at 55 Savushkina.

Also referenced as sharing this address is an organization called FAN, or Federal News Agency (which Adrian Chen goes into more in his NYT 2015 piece), as well as People’s News, and potentially others which seem to cooperate to some extent in at least aggregating one another’s stories.

Outside of this, what we might call “facts” reported vary pretty widely. Though all seem to agree more or less on the overall structure and work carried out by the Agency, numbers of staff range anywhere from 50 up to 900 at different times, and according to different services.

Paid at wages well above area norms, participants worked as “internet operators,” fulfilling in 12 hour shifts content quotas which varied depending on the section they worked in: whether they were lower-level social media commentators, or more full-fledged bloggers, or worked on other kinds of content such as video.

Wired in September 2017 reported that the Internet Research Agency was supposedly officially disbanded in approximately 2015 (presumably due to bad press), and re-named Glavset, but operates still out of the same address.

Short list of personnel named in the media allegedly involved with the IRA:

Moscow Information Technologies

Last but not least, as further proof the knowledge and technology to pull off these types of online campaigns is alive and well in Russia, we turn to the case of Moscow Information Technologies, an IT group which supports the Mayor of Moscow.

Anonymous International/Shaltai Boltai also in 2014 leaked some emails between media outlets and government-linked Moscow Information Technologies which worked with Mayor Sobyanin to manipulate public opinion about his administration. Among many other activities, Moscow Times reported in May 2017:

“MIT devised a scheme wherein Moscow’s neighborhood councils (most of them totally loyal to the mayor and to United Russia) set up dozens of similar news websites that are capable of firing off volleys of nearly identical news articles promoting the mayor’s initiatives. This onslaught fools Yandex’s algorithm into thinking that something important is happening. The news aggregator doesn’t differentiate between the sources, and thus assumes there’s a news event that deserves top billing in its ranking system, if hundreds of different outlets are reporting on a single event.”

Fake news rings

Macedonia

The tactics described by ex-employees of the Internet Research Agency, combined with other leaks relating to Nashi, and those above by Moscow Information Technologies seem to paint a technical picture which just so happens to mesh handily with fake news endeavors around the world, particularly those famously run out of Macedonia.

Russian coordination?

The Guardian in July 2017 suggested Robert Mueller was looking into possible ties between these types of fake news sites, to Russian and far-right websites in the United States leading up to the election. Quoting from that article:

“Mattes, a former Senate investigator, did some digging into the sudden phenomenon of eastern European Sanders enthusiasts. He found a spike in activity on the anonymous browsing tool Tor in Macedonia that coincided with the launch of the fake news campaign, which he believes could represent Russian handlers contacting potential east European hosts to help them set up automated websites.”

“He has also found a high degree of apparent coordination in the dissemination of fake news between official Russian propaganda outlets and “alt-right” sites in the US.

“They synchronise so quickly it looks as if they know when a particularly story was going to come out,” he added. “And they all parrot the Kremlin narrative.”

Breitbart

“When I traveled to Macedonia last summer, Borce Pejcev, a computer programmer who has set up dozens of fake-news sites — for around 100 euros each — said it wasn’t quite that simple. Macedonians don’t invent fake news stories, he told me. “No one here knows anything about American politics. They copy and paste from American sites, maybe try to come up with more dramatic headline.” Fox News, TruePundit.com, DailyCaller.com, InfoWars and Breitbart, he said, were among the Macedonians’ most common source material (“Breit-bart was best”).”

Another NY Times article from September 2017 explains how Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon latched onto false news and rumor-mongering out of Twin Falls Idaho, the so-called Fawnbrook incident:

“The Twin Falls story aligned perfectly with the ideology that Stephen Bannon, then the head of Breitbart News, had been developing for years, about the havoc brought on by unchecked immigration and Islamism, all of it backed by big-business interests and establishment politicians. Bannon latched onto the Fawnbrook case and used his influence to expand its reach.”

Micro-targeting

“Senator Mark Warner, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that the “million-dollar question” about the Facebook ads centered on how the Russians knew whom to target.”

Speculations are of course rife regarding the nature and connections between the Trump campaign, which was obviously served by disinformation and trolling campaigns, and agents of the Russian government. Did the Russians know which voters in which states to concentrate their efforts on? And if so, how exactly did they get this data?

Cambridge Analytica

Though the link is for now tenuous, one avenue of official investigation has gone after the potential role of big data company, Cambridge Analytica, which first worked on Ted Cruz’s campaign, later on Trump’s, and which may or may not have worked on Brexit. Incidentally, Breitbart’s Bannon was at one time VP of Cambridge Analytica, and held between a $1 and $5M stake in the company.

Internet monitoring in Russia

Of course, the Russians may not have needed any outside help when it comes to monitoring internet activity. Since 2011, the Russian government has cracked-down hard on internet freedoms. For starters, all ISPs in Russia are required by the government to run a system called SORM (Wikipedia) which the Federal Security Service can use to access web traffic:

“It allow[s] the agency to unilaterally monitor users’ communications metadata and content, including phone calls, email traffic and web browsing activity. […] In 2014, the system was expanded to include social media platforms…”

Though it is mysteriously unavailable at the time of this writing, we also have an interesting solicitation by the Russian government from 2014 for monitoring software partly entitled (auto-translation), “automatic selection of media information, studying the information field, monitoring blogs and social media.”

“Information materials will be preliminarily processed, they will be grouped on specific topics: the president, the administration of the president’s administration, the prime minister, opposition protests, governors, negative events in the country, incidents, criticism of the authorities.”

Without having access the technical data which those platforms must have, we can speculate with a high degree of probability what signals and indicators Facebook, Twitter and Google must be able to use to identify potential malicious Russian accounts (with the disclaimer that each of these can be spoofed):

Key takeaways

Making crazy walls is super fun.

Information warfare is definitely ‘a thing.’

“Lots of governments are doing it.”

Russian media outlet Vedomosti said in May 2014 that the techniques pioneered by the Russian government proved to be so successful at home after the mass protests that they exported them to the European and American markets.

Vladimir Putin has long maintained that the internet is a CIA ploy, as an excuse to enforce ever-tighter controls over the technology. He also claims color revolutions, mass protests against the Russian government (as well as the Arab Spring) were orchestrated by foreign actors.

I haven’t gone down the 🐇 🕳 of whether Putin’s claims are true, but the development of such tools around 2010–2011 in the United States for use against foreign targets is certainly an interesting correlation.

Based on my research, there is a stunning lack of original reporting available on these topics which are of potentially grave international importance.

News outlets — even major “reputable” ones — seem to just be reporting on one another’s reporting. It’s a hall of mirrors all the way down. And it’s not just on this topic: it’s the whole news ecosystem.

Fake news and so-called ‘meme warfare’ aren’t some accident of our post-modern mainstream media, but the obvious through-line of technologies whose goal is to amorally propagate information regardless of quality or veracity.

Fact-checking as a counter to misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and fake news is not a fool-proof process. It is made all the more difficult when there are very few, or only obscured sources available to the public. (See #6)

I’m not crazy about what Wikileaks has done politically, but as a tool for organizing leaked documents for further research by members of the public, it’s exactly what is needed.

Wikipedia articles are as good as the sources they cite.

Fact-TRACKING may ultimately prevail over fact-checking. That is, in a world of dwindling original sources, and an endless multitude of rip-offs and copies, perhaps there is an epidemiological approach that could be applied to tracking the origin and distribution of blocks of information (e.g., “facts,” factoids, sound-bites, or memes for that matter). Blockchain for news, anyone?

In conclusion:

“The internet will continue to be a confusing information-psychological warzone until the networked-ness of information is made visible so that people can easily and instantly see where stuff’s coming from and who/ what it’s associated with and what effects their interacting with it may have.”

Strictly speaking, this isn’t a “Russia issue” at all. Any malicious actor could weaponize these vectors. It’s an information issue. And it’s here to stay until we do something about the entire system, not just the symptoms

Further notes:

2011.

“But 2011 began with the Arab Spring chasing out the rulers of Tunisia and Egypt, and ended with Moscow’s middle classes taking to the streets in Facebook-organized protests against electoral corruption. Facebook did more than just make it easier to organize; in a year of popular revolution, it let some Russians feel they were part of something bigger, that they had a chance. It was a profound shock to Putin’s government.”

… “Opposition websites were hit with powerful and coordinated distributed denial of service attacks, trolling, and disinformation. Deluged with pro-government propaganda, local news platforms basically gave up trying to separate fact from political fiction. The sheer volume of fake news, plus its sophistication, meant algorithms could no longer tell the difference.”

“In September 2011 Russia overtook Germany on the European market with the highest number of unique visitors online.[2] In March 2013 a survey found that Russian had become the second most commonly used language on the web.[3] “

2012:

Same Slate source as above:

… “In 2012, new censorship measures were brought in, using technologies that indiscriminately block addresses and inspect each packet of data.”

“Since 2012, Russia maintains a centralized internet blacklist (known as the “single register”) maintained by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor). The list is used for the censorship of individual URLs, domain names, and IP addresses. It was originally introduced to block sites that contain materials advocating drug abuse and drug production, descriptions of suicide methods, and containing child pornography. It was subsequently amended to allow the blocking of materials that are classified as extremist, call for illegal meetings, or contain other content deemed illegal.[1]”

… “Internet service providers (ISPs) are held legally responsible for any illegal content that is accessible to their users (intermediary liability).[8]”

… “A ban on all software and websites related to circumventing internet filtering in Russia, including VPN software, anonymizers, and instructions on how to circumvent government website blocking, was passed in 2017.[21]”

… “Russia’s System of Operational-Investigatory Measures (SORM) requires telecommunications operators to install hardware provided by the Federal Security Service (FSB). It allow the agency to unilaterally monitor users’ communications metadata and content, including phone calls, email traffic and web browsing activity.[8] Metadata can be obtained without a warrant.[8] In 2014, the system was expanded to include social media platforms, and the Ministry of Communications ordered companies to install new equipment with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) capability.[24]”

… “As of January 2018, companies registered in Russia as “organizers of information dissemination”, such as online messaging applications, will not be permitted to allow unidentified users.[29]”

Navalny, 2014, same Wikipedia source:

“In March 2014, in the midst of the Crimean crisis, the LiveJournal blog of Alexei Navalny, Kasparov.ru and Grani.ru were blocked by the government. These sites, which opposed the Russian government, were blocked for “making calls for unlawful activity and participation in mass events held with breaches of public order.”[68]”

“In August 2014, SORM-2 usage was extended to monitoring of social networks, chats and forums, requiring their operators to install SORM probes in their networks.[5][6]”

… “The SORM device recommended by the FSB is named Omega.[10] Equipment by Cellebrite appears to be in use.[11] SORM also enables the use of mobile control points, a laptop that can be plugged directly into communication hubs and immediately intercept and record the operator’s traffic.[3]”

… “Since 2010, intelligence officers can wiretap someone’s phones or monitor their Internet activity based on received reports that an individual is preparing to commit a crime. They do not have to back up those allegations with formal criminal charges against the suspect.[15] According to a 2011 ruling, intelligence officers have the right to conduct surveillance of anyone who they claim is preparing to call for “extremist activity.”[15]”

“The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.”

Informant, supposed former employee: Ludmila Savchuk

“The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted; those digital addresses can sometimes be used to reveal the real identity of the poster. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day. Workers received a constant stream of “technical tasks” — point-by-point exegeses of the themes they were to address, all pegged to the latest news.”

“The point was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person.”

“Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate feeling,” Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row, followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments on other workers’ posts. “

Savchuk:

“While employed there, she copied dozens of documents to her personal email account and also plied her co-workers for information. She made a clandestine video of the office. In February, she leaked it all to a reporter for Moi Raion, a local newspaper known for its independent reporting. The documents, together with her story, offered the most detailed look yet into the daily life of a pro-Kremlin troll. “

Russian media claims IRA is funded by restaurater Evgeny Prigozhin

Prigozhin –> Concord (holding company)

An employee of Concord was spotted as IRA team leader

Concord approves payments to IRA (leaked emails)

“The boom in pro-Kremlin trolling can be traced to the antigovernment protests of 2011, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets after evidence of fraud in the recent Parliamentary election emerged. The protests were organized largely over Facebook and Twitter and spearheaded by leaders, like the anticorruption crusader Alexei Navalny, who used LiveJournal blogs to mobilize support. The following year, when Vyascheslav Volodin, the new deputy head of Putin’s administration and architect of his domestic policy, came into office, one of his main tasks was to rein in the Internet. Volodin, a lawyer who studied engineering in college, approached the problem as if it were a design flaw in a heating system. Forbes Russia reported that Volodin installed in his office a custom-designed computer terminal loaded with a system called Prism, which monitored public sentiment online using 60 million sources. According to the website of its manufacturer, Prism “actively tracks the social media activities that result in increased social tension, disorderly conduct, protest sentiments and extremism.” Or, as Forbes put it, “Prism sees social media as a battlefield.””

“Laws were passed requiring bloggers to register with the state. A blacklist allowed the government to censor websites without a court order. Internet platforms like Yandex were subjected to political pressure, while others, like VKontakte, were brought under the control of Kremlin allies. Putin gave ideological cover to the crackdown by calling the entire Internet a “C.I.A. project,” one that Russia needed to be protected from.”

Columbian Chemicals hoax:

“The chain that links the Columbian Chemicals hoax to the Internet Research Agency begins with an act of digital subterfuge perpetrated by its online enemies. Last summer, a group called Anonymous International — believed to be unaffiliated with the well-known hacktivist group Anonymous — published a cache of hundreds of emails said to have been stolen from employees at the agency.”

… “The emails indicated that the Internet Research Agency had begun to troll in English. One document outlined a project called “World Translation”; the problem, it explained, was that the foreign Internet was biased four to one against Russia, and the project aimed to change the ratio. Another email contained a spreadsheet that listed some of the troll accounts the agency was using on the English-language web. After BuzzFeed reported on the leak, I used the spreadsheet to start mapping the network of accounts on Facebook and Twitter, trying to draw connections.”

“Soshnikov showed me how he used a service called Yomapic, which maps the locations of social-media users, to determine that photos posted to Infosurfing’s Instagram account came from 55 Savushkina. He had been monitoring all of the content posted from 55 Savushkina for weeks and had assembled a huge database of troll content.”

FAN – Federal News Agency shares same address / building.

People’s News, same address

I can see now why that 2015 Chen NYT article is the canonical source for all this stuff.

Jumping to Buzzfeed’s 2014 reporting on the Internet Research Agency leaked emails from Anonymous International:

“The documents show instructions provided to the commenters that detail the workload expected of them. On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day.”

Names as IRA leader: Igor Osadchy

Possibly founded in April 2014

Buzzfeed article links to this Russian site as holding the leaked emails. I clicked the link at the site and was re-directed to a mega.nz page reading telling me the file was unavailable because the account had multiple Terms of Service violations.

[Note: immediately after that, I experienced an unusual glitch on my self-hosted WordPress site telling me my session had expired and to log back in. Suspicious!]

“Shaltai also released documents about how Concord, a company owned by Kremlin-connected restaurant owner Evgeny Prigozhin, apparently coordinates an army of pro-Putin “Internet trolls” through an outfit called the Internet Research Agency.

Igor Osadchy, whom the leaked emails name as the director of Translator, a project at the Internet Research Agency tasked with placing comments in foreign news media, later sued Shaltai for personal data theft. A representative at Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal agency for media oversight, then announced, “A court has determined that the information [published by Shaltai] must be deleted, but the website’s hosting provider has not responded to our notification. Therefore, our agency has ordered Internet Service Providers to block this blog.” On July 27, 2014, acting on orders from Roskomnadzor, Russian ISPs blocked access to the domain b0ltai.org. The group’s main Twitter account, @b0ltai, was also blocked. Today, Shaltai’s website is accessible in Russia only via VPN or a mirror site. The group also runs @b0ltai2, a duplicate Twitter account, still unblocked in Russia, that reproduces all the first account’s posts, down to its retweets.”

… “In August 2014, Anonymous International released archives from three different email accounts allegedly belonging to Dmitri Medvedev, as well as correspondence from Duma deputy and United Russia member Robert Shlegel about an organized “troll” attack on the websites of major American and British news media (including The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, USA Today, and The Huffington Post).”

“[The IRA ran] at least 118 communities and accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter […] In August-September 2017, all identified communities with a combined audience of 6 million people were blocked by Facebook and Twitter.”

… “Communities associated with the “troll factory” for two years initiated about 40 offline events in the US cities, said a source close to the leadership of the organization. “

… “

Assistance in their conduct was provided by approximately 100 local activists who, according to the interlocutors of RBC magazine, did not know who they were dealing with: all communication was on the Internet, in English and from fake accounts.”

RBC.ru source is probably another “canonical”-ish source, which many other news articles refer to.

“The Guardian spoke to two former employees of the troll enterprise, one of whom was in a department running fake blogs on the social network LiveJournal, and one who was part of a team that spammed municipal chat forums around Russia with pro-Kremlin posts. Both said they were employed unofficially and paid cash-in-hand. “

… ““We had to write ‘ordinary posts’, about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but then every now and then throw in a political post about how the Kiev government is fascist, or that sort of thing,” she said.

Scrolling through one of the LiveJournal accounts she ran, the pattern is clear. There are posts about “Europe’s 20 most beautiful castles” and “signs that show you are dating the wrong girl”, interspersed with political posts about Ukraine or suggesting that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is corrupt.”

… “Instructions for the political posts would come in “technical tasks” that the trolls received each morning, while the non-political posts had to be thought up personally.”

… “The trolls worked in teams of three. The first one would leave a complaint about some problem or other, or simply post a link, then the other two would wade in, using links to articles on Kremlin-friendly websites and “comedy” photographs lampooning western or Ukrainian leaders with abusive captions.

Marat shared six of his technical task sheets from his time in the office with the Guardian. Each of them has a news line, some information about it, and a “conclusion” that the commenters should reach.”

… “Leaked documents have linked the opaque company running the troll factory to structures close to the Kremlin, but there has been no hard evidence. “

“She was put in the so-called Special Projects department using the LiveJournal blogging platform, where, she says, “people pretending to be individual bloggers– a fortune teller, a soldier, a Ukrainian man – had to, between posts about daily life or interesting facts, insert political reflections”. “

“Social media has been a part of his presidential strategy since at least 2010, when members of the country’s main youth group, IRELI, were instructed to proliferate pro-government opinions online. As troll training-centers multiplied across the country—one source says there were 52 in different towns and cities, funded with government money…”

Article compares pro-government troll efforts around the world ^.

“It is estimated that 45% of Twitter activity in Russia is managed by such accounts.”

Estimated how, and by whom?

Independent, October 2017, accounts of IRA from a supposed former employee.

“He worked at the company from November 2014 to April 2015 and said he would impersonate “Kentucky rednecks” and African-Americans online on a regular basis.”

Daily Beast, Oct. 2017, version of same story.

“And Baskaev fingered Putin pal Yevgeny Prigozhin as his former “boss,” or “our guy who gives us money.” But the real head of the American department, he said, was the Azerbaijani-born Dzheykhun Aslanov—known simply as “Jay.””

Wired, September 2017 article discussing switch from IRA name to Glavset:

“The IRA, which was the subject of a 2015 New York Times Magazine investigation, may have been behind many of the bogus Facebook ads, the company says.

Of course, things aren’t as simple as that. Russian corporate records indicate Internet Research Agency has been inactive since December 2016. But that doesn’t mean that Russians no longer engage in such activity. According to Russia researchers at the liberal advocacy group Center for American Progress, there’s reason to believe the Internet Research Agency is operating under a new name: Glavset.

A Russian tax filing reveals that Glavset, which launched in February 2015, operates out of the same office building—55 Savushkin Street in St. Petersburg—that once housed the Internet Research Agency. The filing lists Mikhail Ivanovich Bystrov, former head of the Internet Research Agency, as its general director.”

… “It’s not clear whether Glavset purchased political ads on Facebook, or any other platform. A Facebook spokesman could not immediately say whether Facebook uncovered any ads placed by Glavset in the investigation it revealed Wednesday. That probe found 470 inauthentic pages and accounts affiliated with Internet Research Agency; Facebook turned that information over to special counsel Robert Mueller.”

“Facebook officials said the fake accounts were created by a Russian company called the Internet Research Agency, which is known for using “troll” accounts to post on social media and comment on news websites.”

Is there a link to a blog post or other official testimony of them linking these accounts and ad buys to IRA?

Same source:

“Mr. Stamos wrote that while some of the ads specifically mentioned the two candidates, most focused instead on issues that were polarizing the electorate: “divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.””

“In reviewing the ads buys, we have found approximately $100,000 in ad spending from June of 2015 to May of 2017 — associated with roughly 3,000 ads — that was connected to about 470 inauthentic accounts and Pages in violation of our policies. Our analysis suggests these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia.”

The second more broad:

“In this latest review, we also looked for ads that might have originated in Russia — even those with very weak signals of a connection and not associated with any known organized effort. This was a broad search, including, for instance, ads bought from accounts with US IP addresses but with the language set to Russian — even though they didn’t necessarily violate any policy or law. In this part of our review, we found approximately $50,000 in potentially politically related ad spending on roughly 2,200 ads.”

“One question underlying the investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia is whether Russia-sponsored operators would have needed any guidance from American political experts. Facebook said that some of the ads linked to Russian accounts had targeted particular geographic areas, which may raise questions about whether anyone had helped direct such targeting.”

“FOLLOW THE MEMES…”

Wikipedia web brigades page continuing:

“Any blog post written by an agency employee, according to the leaked files, must contain “no fewer than 700 characters” during day shifts and “no fewer than 1,000 characters” on night shifts. Use of graphics and keywords in the post’s body and headline is also mandatory. In addition to general guidelines, bloggers are also provided with “technical tasks” – keywords and talking points on specific issues, such as Ukraine, Russia’s internal opposition and relations with the West.[21]”

… “In 2015 Lawrence Alexander disclosed a network of propaganda websites sharing the same Google Analytics identifier and domain registration details, allegedly run by Nikita Podgorny from Internet Research Agency. The websites were mostly meme repositories focused on attacking Ukraine, Euromaidan, Russian opposition and Western policies. Other websites from this cluster promoted president Putin and Russian nationalism, and spread alleged news from Syria presenting anti-Western viewpoints.[37]”

… “In August 2015 Russian researchers correlated Google search statistics of specific phrases with their geographic origin, observing increases in specific politically loaded phrases (such as “Poroshenko”, “Maidan”, “sanctions”) starting from 2013 and originating from very small, peripheral locations in Russia, such as Olgino, which also happens to be the headquarters of the Internet Research Agency company.[38]”

“The group’s office in Olgino, a historical district of Saint Petersburg, was exposed by Novaya Gazeta newspaper in 2013.[3]”

… “According to journalists’ investigations, the office in Olgino was named as Internet Research Agency Ltd. (Russian: ООО «Агентство интернет-исследований»).[3][8] The company was founded in the summer of 2013.[6]

“In 2014, according to Russian media, Internet Research Ltd. (Russian: ООО «Интернет исследования»), founded in March 2014, joined the agency’s activity. Novaya Gazeta newspaper claim this company to be a successor of Internet Research Agency Ltd.[10] Internet Research Ltd. is considered to be linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the holding company Concord. The “Trolls of Olgino” from Saint Petersburg are considered to be his project. As of October 2014, the company belonged to Mikhail Bystrov, who had been the head of the police station at Moscow district of Saint Petersburg.[11]”

… “Russian media point out that according to documents, published by hackers from Anonymous International, Concord is directly involved with trolling administration through the agency. Researchers cite e-mail correspondence, in which Concord gives instructions to trolls and receives reports on accomplished work.[5] “

… “59°59′03.5″N 30°16′19.1″E

According to Russian online newspaper DP.ru, several months before October 2014 the office moved from Olgino to a four-story building at 55 Savushkina Street.[11][12][17]”

… “Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported that, according to Alexey Soskovets, head of the office in Olgino, North-Western Service Agency was hiring employees for similar projects in Moscow and other cities in 2013.[3]

“From the data of the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, it follows that the organization was registered on July 26, 2013. The founder is Mikhail Kurkin, the general director is Nikolai Chumakov.”

… “

Whew, well I think that’s a fairly exhaustive round-up of top links and quotes relative to the subject. Will try to condense this down into a more human-readable format in coming days.

“The report describes the varied forms this manipulation takes. In the Philippines, it is manifested as a “keyboard army” paid $10 a day to operate fake social media accounts, which supported Rodrigo Duterte in the run-up to his election last year, and backed his crackdown on the drug trade this year. Turkey’s ruling party enlisted 6,000 people to manipulate discussions, drive agendas and counter opponents. The government of Sudan’s approach is more direct: a unit within the country’s intelligence service created fake accounts to fabricate support for government policies and denounce critical journalists.”

Having trouble with the internet lately. Seeing so many shoulds floating around there. No one person can respond to all of them. And yet every day, there is so much outrage — some real and valid. We’re putting it onto each other. Our own anxieties and fears, we see more clearly their outlines in others.

So what is a should to do? Who should should? Why shouldn’t you should? What are the five fabulous things that should blow my mind about should — if I only click on this article. If I only sign up. If I only give my email address. Should I be giving these people my email address? Should I be spending my time this way?

Should according to whose rules, according to what metric? What happens if we would and could and knew we should, but just finally for whatever reason don’t…

Old English sceal, Northumbrian scule “I owe/he owes, will have to, ought to, must” (infinitive sculan, past tense sceolde), a common Germanic preterite-present verb (along with can, may, will), from Proto-Germanic *skal- (source also of Old Saxon sculan, Old Frisian skil, Old Norse and Swedish skola, Middle Dutch sullen, Old High German solan, German sollen, Gothic skulan “to owe, be under obligation;” related via past tense form to Old English scyld “guilt,” German Schuld “guilt, debt;” also Old Norse Skuld, name of one of the Norns), from PIE root *skel- (2) “to be under an obligation.”

Old English gyldan “to gild, to cover with a thin layer of gold,” from Proto-Germanic *gulthjan (source also of Old Norse gylla “to gild,” Old High German ubergulden “to cover with gold”), verb from *gultham “gold” (see gold).

You shall wrap your shoulds in the gold of guilt; that much is an obligation.

There are a lot of things about social media that have kind of ruined the internet in some regards. But there are a few amazing innovations as well. One of those, for me, is blocking.

When you’re in network or on a platform, it’s often an option to “ghost” someone — which in my opinion is a completely legitimate thing to do to random weirdos you encounter online who rub you the wrong way. Let’s face it: humans were not designed to all get along perfectly with each other.

So blocking is really, really handy. I’d never gone into that realm though at a browser level until recently. A blog I was sort of hate-reading for years finally went too far, and offered a clear signal that it was over between us finally.

You can create different sets of sites to block under common rules. Like if you only want to access FB after work or something, you could set that up as a rule. Which may be fine for some, but when I block it’s forever.

That’s why I chose, under “When to block”, All Day and Every Day.

After I established a beach head with this one known bad_actor I gained the confidence a few days later to add another similar site.

It’s good to have an open mind. And make conversations where we compare and challenge our values and work towards a common good. But some things are just bullshit and can be blocked without any noticeable loss. If anything, you might notice you’ve gained something by taking back your concentration and attention on things that weren’t worth your time maybe ever, or, if nothing else, aren’t any more.